


he's found me, my aslan.

by xavierdolls



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Bisexual Character, Bisexual James Olsen, Bisexual Male Character, Coming Out, F/F, F/M, Gender Dysphoria, Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Lesbian Kara Danvers, Lesbian Lena Luthor, M/M, Suicide Attempt, Trans Character, Trans James Olsen, Trans Male Character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-06
Updated: 2018-06-06
Packaged: 2019-05-18 21:53:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14860965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xavierdolls/pseuds/xavierdolls
Summary: It’s three years of burning rubber in his brain. He wishes there was an epiphany. He wishes any part of him made sense. Wishes he had proof, any proof, but he has nothing. Not even a memory. All he has are thoughts, his feelings that he can’t show anyone else, that evaporate under scrutiny. A suffering that always runs clear.or:trans!james olsen [now edited]





	he's found me, my aslan.

“J****!” his mother‘s standing on the porch and yelling for him, one hand on her hip and the other on the railing. He knows better than to push it, so he drops the tennis ball he’s spent a half hour trying to crack open and runs back across the front yard.

“Yes, mama?”

She bends down and brushes the worst of the dirt off his shoulders, his face, his dress. She notices the splash of red mud across the back, from where he slipped and fell into the clay that last night’s rain had made of the creek two blocks west.

His mother clicks her tongue. “You have to be more careful, J****. This’ll stain.”

J**** wants to wipe his hands dry and clean on his shirt front.

“I can’t run in this.”

His mother nods. “Then don’t, princess. You’ll get hurt anyway.”

J**** thinks that maybe he wanted to get hurt. Kyle from his class fell and took of a layer of skin on his knee, and four girls in a row came up to him to ask if he was okay.  Maybe J**** wants girls to ask about him, too.

“What about jeans? I want jeans.”

His mother clicks her tongue, again, louder. Enough of a no.

He asks his dad the same question when he comes that night, and he takes J**** shopping two days after.

///

Clark is soft in a way that makes J**** think he has a chance at being his friend. Clark’s in J****’s class in fourth grade, and J**** doesn’t think he’d ever seen him around the school before. It’s a small school. J**** knows everyone.

The other boys all barrel out to the field out back of the class rooms as soon as the ball for lunch rings, leaving the teachers in heels and pencil skirts without a chance to catch up to them. Clark hesitates. He puts all his pencils back into the right holder, and pushes his chair back when he gets up from it. J****watches him from a bench, picking at his ham and cheese sandwich.

“Hey,” J**** says when Clark walks by. Clark snaps his eyes up from where they were trained on the ground. One lace is untried. “I’m J****,” he says, and shifts a little over on the bench so Clark can sit there if he wants to.

“M’ Clark,” Clark says. He ties the loose lace, and seems surprised that J**** is still there when he looks up.

“Are you new?”

Clark nods. He didn’t say anything more.

“Ok,” J**** said.

Clark sits next to him.

///

They start eating lunch together and just… never stop.

///

Around 7th grade, people start to see their friendship differently. It'd never been an issue; everyone had known for years that they were a package deal, and no one had thought it was strange. Clark and J****. J**** and Clark. Every project, every field trip, they buddied. The teachers didn't even ask either of them who they wanted to work with, anymore, the answer was so obvious.

But J**** came back to school after that summer a little taller, a little bigger, a little different. So did everyone else, but people seemed to notice it on him the most. He wouldn't have minded that, not really, but  _Clark_  noticed, too, and that was the worst part.

"Hey, are you guys like - dating?" Some kid from the grade below asks them one lunch time. J**** is holding out a packet of pretzels and Clark's trying to fish a whole one out.

His hand freezes and the thin, plastic rustling stops.

“Are we…?” J**** heard, but it takes five seconds for his brain to catch up. It hits him and he laughs. “No, no, we’re just – right, Clark?” J**** looks to Clark for confirmation. That easy, country boy smile, soft and reassuring and certain.

Clark is blushing and J****’s stomach drops.

///

_Girls._

J**** splashes water on his face in a way that always looks easy in commercials. It’s cold and drips down his face, off his chin, wets his shirt.

He likes girls. Just girls. That’s what no one knows. That’s why he’s starting to avoid Clark, why he ate lunch alone in the library three times that week.

He grabs a towel and pats his face down with it. He half hangs it back up, and looks into the mirror. A lot of the guys in his class are starting to get spots on their face. Some of the girls, too, sure.

Not him. Not Clark, either. He’s glad that they’re different together.

Girls. Women _. Females._

 

_Right._

J**** rubs at his face.

There’s a word for that.

///

“I’m a lesbian.”

It all comes out in a rush and the word feels wrong in his mouth. J**** thinks about the videos he watched in preparation, hours of women recounting different angles of the same story.

The grandfather clock in the living room ticks through the silence.

J****’s dad looks at his mom, and she looks at the ground, and neither of them will look at him. It’s a long time of just that. The food’s getting cold.

He wishes he was in his room, wishes that no one could hear him breathe.

///

They come around. Eventually.

///

Clark is confused in an innocent way. He asks a lot of stupid questions, and J**** answers each one as it comes. He gets tired, sometimes, but if this is the work he has to do to keep Clark his friend… he guesses it could be worse. It’s awkward for a few days, but Clark never stops eating lunch with him.

When someone else, boy almost twice his size, stumbles up to Clark and J**** at lunch time and asks the same stupid question Clark just had, but with a whole different context, J**** swears he can feel the structural integrity of the bench they’re on starts to falter as Clark grips it so hard.

Clark never hits anyone – it’s one of J****’s favourite things about him. That doesn’t mean he needs to operate under the same principles, though. J**** lays the other boy down and he throws a word back up at him, pulls it out like a golden gun aimed at his head, like it’s a weakness, Achillies heel. Like it’ll bring J**** down to his knees with its tailored poison.

But J**** already feels it then. The bullet’s not for him.

He gets detention.

///

It’s three years of burning rubber in his brain. He wishes there was an epiphany. He wishes any part of him made sense. Wishes he had proof, any proof, but he has nothing. Not even a memory. All he has are thoughts, his feelings that he can’t show anyone else, that evaporate under scrutiny. A suffering that always runs clear.

J**** looks in the mirror and pulls at his face. Searching for the perfect angles, the lighting that makes him look the most like himself. He wonders what he’d look like, if he… that. Sometimes, he thinks he can almost see it. 

It has to be enough. He looks up ‘good boy names’ and makes a list, tucks it in the back of his English book where the work is never hard enough and finally has something to think about in class.

///

James worries his lip raw during math class, and when he starts to taste blood he knows he can’t go on like this. His whole body fills with nervous energy, and Clark notices. He could see all the way through to his heart to watch it pound, but Clark doesn’t even need his powers to tell that James is miserable.

“J****, you alright?” Clark taps James on the shoulder, charming but concerned smile in place. James doesn’t look right at him: he stares at the equation jotted down on his page and absorbs none of it. A long minute passes, and Clark’s smile starts to fade, makes him feel dumb.

“Can I talk to you after class?” James whispers so softly he’s sure Clark couldn’t have heard it. Just before he repeats himself, Clark hums back an ‘un huh’.

///

Clark is patient. It takes James fifteen minutes to say it. Clark doesn’t understand.

James doesn’t even need him too.

///

James almost reads himself to death. He gets twenty pages deep into obscure academia, trying to pick apart the laws, find a gap just big enough for him to fit through. There isn't one. There isn't one and James starts crying before he even feels sad, starting at the open DMV website, another fucking dead end. Eighteen, he sees that again and again. Over eighteen, over eighteen, and James counts the months and years he has left. It's so long. It's so long he doesn't think he'll live. He closes his laptop and rubs at his temples, and when he looks down at this body it just all gets worse.

It's all been getting worse.

When it was vague, it was bearable. But now that he knows what to look for.... now that he  _knows_ …

///

Clark can tell. James feels like everyone can, maybe, but he thinks the oversized jacket he's wearing might be enough to hide it from most people. Clark isn't most people.

James can't stop himself from pulling at the bandages when they get uncomfortable. He tries to do it subtly, like he's reaching to scratch a small itch, or just pulling away where his shirt's sticking to him with sweat. It's still too much movement, and the teacher catches him just as he's fiddling with the clip at the side.

"J****, are you alright?"

He nods and slams his hand back down on his desk like he's been burned. Clark, and everyone, follows the teachers gaze but they're all too late to see it.

"Fine," he blurts out, and he's actually thankful for the skin that makes him feel so different all the time because at least no one can tell how bad he's blushing.

Clarks eyes burn the most. After class, Clark catches him by the wrist and James is shocked by how strong he is. Has he always been?

"What're you wearing?" Clark asks.

"Uh...." James gestures down over his outfit. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, I can..."

Clark weighs what he can and what he can't say. What he saw, what doesn't look healthy. He drops James' wrist.

"Are you... okay?" Clark asks. He can't keep his eyes away from James' chest and it’s just curiosity, it isn't anything, but James sees and James recoils and Clark feels bad, bad, bad.

"M' fine." James pulls his hand back and tightens the strap of his backpack over his shoulder. Wearing his pack on both shoulders makes it worse, so he's slinging it over one, but that's uncomfortable in a whole other way.

"Just be safe." Clark says. He doesn't understand the bandages. Doesn't understand why and if James is hurt, but he can't say anything without saying how he knows.

James nods. He can tell Clark means it. He's so young and so stupid and so good.

He's the best James could hope for.

///

Sports are a special hell. He still has to change in the room with the girls, which he's always hated, but now he doesn't only dread the being looked at. He dreads doing the looking. He feels like a liar, like a germ, like there's a toxic spill in his heart growing neon yellow and he keeps his eyes down, down, always down. The girls don't even know. They laugh and James knows that he doesn't belong there. He thinks about National Geographic, the documentaries he watches compulsively. The predators.

He tries to find a stall to change in because else they'd all see the bandages around his chest. When he can't, he tries to take them off first, under his shirt, hoping against hope that no one will notice.

Even when he's out of the change room, it's hell. When he still has the bandages on, they stop him breathing, and he feels like he's about to pass out. It makes him hate all of it.

It's a shame. James knows he has skill. He watches the basketball team, sometimes. The boy’s basketball team, and he knows he could be just as good as any of them. He sits and watches and he feels a rot start inside of him. When he sits still for long enough, it creeps higher up, gets so uncomfortable that he has to shake out his arms to get the feeling off of him. Clark finds him like that, and taps him on the shoulder.

"Hey.... James...." Clark says, testing the words like a plank he's not sure can take his weight. James had only told him his name a couple of weeks ago, and Clark is the first person to ever use it. Only occasionally. Only when no one else can hear.

But still.

"What're ya up to?"

James points in the direction of the game.

"Just watching."

Clark nods, and slides in next to him. Their shoulders touch but it's not even where they meet. Clark wins that tug of war by a mile. James loves his friend, his best friend, only friend, but... sometimes he looks at Clark and wishes he didn't look like so much of a  _man_.

///

James tells his mother and she acts like nothing is different. He doesn't have the strength to tell her again, to keep bringing it up. It almost killed him the first time. He's gonna tell his dad, soon. Soon. He's still too scared, after his mom. Just a little while more.

///

James' dad dies at war and James never tells him, and then he's at the funeral in a dress and holding his dad's camera. He doesn't know if he wants to kill himself or everyone else.

///

He's seventeen in the back of an ambulance and all he can think about is how there's no sirens, there's no sirens, because it's 3 am and the roads are all empty anyway so there's no need for them. He can hear the machines, the EMT hovering over him, asking him his name and age and if he has any allergies. James stutters through all of it and when they open the ambulance doors and the cold air hits him, he realises he's still in his pyjamas. He thinks he can see his mom's car in the distance, just pulling into the hospital parking lot after following the ambulance. The EMT helps him down. James crosses an arm over his chest. He hadn't had a chance to bind, of course he hadn't. He'd woken with the police in his room and the ambulance outside and his mother screaming how she'd already lost her husband, and now this, and now this.

They check him in and make him drink charcoal. James still can't figure out how they found him. He hadn't even left a note.

///

It takes his own almost suicide before his mom acknowledges something is going on but, hey, at least something worked. He has to see two psychiatrists before they let him out, and he tells them. His voice is small and he's half afraid they'll have him committed, but he managed to get the words out. One of them asks him if there's another name he'd like. He says it, "James", and feels like there's a spotlight on it. Is it a stupid name? Does it even suit him? James can't even remember why he picked it, in the first place, aside from that he liked the sound of it. He shifts under the psychiatrist's gaze and wishes he was still young enough for it to be socially acceptable to use the box of crayons and toys that the psychiatrists obviously keeps for kid patients.

"Okay, James," he can hear the smile in her voice and his head shoots up. Clark was different. Clark was his friend. Of course, Clark would use his name, but this... an adult. An adult with a  _degree_. Something rushes down the back of James' body, like water dripping down the back of his skull. "Does your mother know?"

James shakes his head. Stops. Nods.

"She's.... weird, I don't know. Are you gonna tell her about what I say? Is that what you're writing it down for?" James nods his head in the direction of her open notebook, the one she'd been scribbling in occasionally since he sat down.

“No, James,” her voice is calming and James wants to sink into it, “This is confidential, unless you tell me you’re planning to hurt yourself or anyone else. Then I need to step in, for safety.”

James gave a series of short nods, his mind already three pages ahead. He bounced one leg up and down, unfurling the situation in his mind. If this lady was really that good at her job…. “Do you think you could talk to my mom? I think she might listen to you.”

///

Clark’s at his house and the hour is utterly unreasonable. James only just got out of the hospital, the tags still on his wrist, and he wonders briefly if Clark’s been waiting around his house for him to come home, like a dog.

“Dude, what’re you-“

Before he knows it, Clark had his arms wrapped around him. It’s utterly disarming and James forgets what he was about to say. Clark is taller than him by nearly a foot. It used to bother him, a lot. James isn’t sure when it started to just make him feel safe.

James remembers telling his parents that he liked girls, and thinks about how good Clark smells, like the warm sun is seeping out of him.

When Clark finally pulls apart, James can tell he’s crying. Or been crying, maybe.

“Clark, what’s up?”

“You almost died, James,” This time, Clark says his name angry. It’s the first time James has ever heard it like that, and he takes a half step back, “You almost killed yourself. How could you  _do that_?”

James doesn’t have an answer. Or he does, but he can’t tell Clark. It might just break him in two. The silence stretches out.

“I have something for you,” Clark says. The package is in his backpack, still sealed. Clark hadn’t ever meant to use his powers for something like this, to steal, but he was the one who called the ambulance for James and he’d seen him through the hospital, and it wasn’t just drugs, it was  _medicine_.

Clark takes it out and hands it to James and James doesn’t understand the label. He reads it over and over and looks confused, until his eyes go to Clark for help.

“I looked it up. It should help you, you know, with… your stuff,” he rubs at the back of his neck, “And the other stuff, they say it can make you bigger. I know that’s… you wanna play basketball.”

James stares down at the box until it clicks. He drops it on his bed. He kisses Clark and Clark’s hand reaches for his wrist. He tears off the wristband like it’s nothing, and the yellow sliver floats to the floor.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr [@marshalldolls](http://marshalldolls.tumblr.com/writingcomm).
> 
> Comments encourage me to update!


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